topic SAS Enterprise Guide Projects are Empty in SAS Enterprise Guide

SAS Enterprise Guide Projects are Empty

LornaBea — Fri, 24 Oct 2025 17:03:44 GMT

I've lost two projects in the last two days. I open the project and its empty? Even the SAS program files (that are part of the project) are not in the folder.

I searched the library and found something similar a few years ago but saving the project as a zip file did nothing.

Any ideas?

Re: SAS Enterprise Guide Projects are Empty

Kurt_Bremser — Fri, 24 Oct 2025 17:27:30 GMT

This has happened to me when the project files were stored non-locally (network share or SAS server) and the connection was lost temporarily. Always keep project files on a local drive while working; back them up to a remote location when you're done.

Re: SAS Enterprise Guide Projects are Empty

LornaBea — Fri, 24 Oct 2025 17:45:57 GMT

Thanks Kurt, I work remote so I am unable to store them on my home computer. I've never had this happen before.

Re: SAS Enterprise Guide Projects are Empty

Kurt_Bremser — Fri, 24 Oct 2025 17:53:22 GMT

If you work remotely, the admins there should be able to provide a backed up copy that's OK. The size should help them find the correct version.

Re: SAS Enterprise Guide Projects are Empty

Kurt_Bremser — Fri, 24 Oct 2025 18:00:23 GMT

PS "local" means "local to where EG is running". If you run EG on a remote session (Terminal Server, Citrix), this is most probably all virtualized, and if the connection and subsequently the whole session crashes, such loss can occur. You could create a copy of the project file each time before you start working, using Windows Explorer.

Re: SAS Enterprise Guide Projects are Empty

BillSawyer — Tue, 28 Oct 2025 14:14:23 GMT

If you are 100% sure your project screen shot is from a project that you once ran and saved, then, feel free to attach it and I will see if there is any of your code to recover.

And, your older version of EG likely set version control/program history to active by default and likely you are not using that feature so I would turn it off to hopefully help avoid loss of work the option is in EG > Tools > Options > (either under SAS Programs or Program History or Version Control).

Also, any chance you lost connection (network, client, server) or EG locked up and you had to terminate?

If that happened and when you restarted EG you might have been prompted to open a recovered project and that recovered project might have been a bad recovery then you possibly saved it over your last good project save.

This can happen with anti-virus software locking or deleting files that are being used by EG causing a lock and/or bad project recovery. So, if you are ever prompted to open/save a recovered project make sure you save that recovered project to a new filename.

Regards,

Bill